


More happy lives

by Lilliburlero



Series: Half Year's Night [1]
Category: David Blaize - E. F. Benson
Genre: Ableist Language, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, M/M, Post-Canon, Stealth Crossover, World War I, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-19
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-03-08 06:22:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3198695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hughes has become a decent chap again.</p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: reference to underage sex, reference to prisoner of war experience in South-East Asia during the Second World War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Makioka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makioka/gifts).



> To Makioka's prompt: ['Drummers: Frank and Hughes (or Frank/Hughes if the fancy takes you) meeting years later'](http://lilliburlero.dreamwidth.org/61161.html?thread=87017#cmt87017).

The man in the hindmost pew would have been conspicuous even had the congregation been swelled by its term-time complement of devout and fastidious undergraduates. What little of his grey hair remained was close-cropped to a long, narrow skull; a moustache of the sort that cartoonists draw as shorthand for apoplectic conventionality was belied by humorous grey-green eyes; his spare, upright frame was clad in tweed of the indestructible class; a hat that it was curiously difficult to imagine on his head lay beside him on the pew.  No-one, in short, could look less like the typical communicant at 10am Low Mass at St-Peter-Without. (Not that he had actually gone to the rail.)

Rising, he intercepted Frank with an unexpectedly graceful feint at his right elbow and, ‘I beg your pardon. It is Maddox, isn’t it? Frank Maddox?’

Frank, who had remained a stubborn four centimetres shy of the _un metre quatre-vingt_ that according to his mother _fait un homme_ , was obliged to look up, which he did with the undissembling, apologetic look of someone who is remembered more often than he remembers.

‘Yes—I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t—’ 

‘No—I didn’t expect you should. Thomas Hughes.’

‘I’m terribly—I still—were you a pupil?’

The man raised his eyebrows and turned down the corners of his mouth in a droll moué. ‘I was—at Marchester.’

Frank’s fingers had been resting lightly on the pew-back beside him; he gripped it. ‘ _Topknot_?’

Hughes ran his hand—big, bony, neatly-kept nails—reflexively over his head. ‘It’s been a while since—’

‘Good God. Come outside—’ 

He gathered his belongings and followed Frank to the door. The hat, though perfectly regular, looked no likelier on his head than it had off.

‘I say,’ he said when they were outside in the lane, ‘it was jolly nice, hearing the old Prayer Book, or whatever it is.’

‘Yes—1662, of course.’ 

‘I don’t know why I—I’d come in on the train to buy Christmas presents for my great-nieces. Stuffing a pound note in an envelope won’t do, apparently, as tending to their corruption at the Milk Bar among the local Teds—and then I saw the church, tucked away in the undergrowth there—’

‘I must protest _undergrowth_ , my dear fellow. _Wild garden_ , planted by some terribly modern churchwarden about forty years ago.’

‘Oh. I wouldn’t know. And I took a look inside, but I’d not been there a minute when the Vicar beetled in and said Mass was about to begin. I thought that meant RCs, and I’d better scram—but then I saw—I mean, I thought I’d postpone at all costs the evil hour when I’d have to ask a shopgirl for _wholesome articles, females, aged fifteen and thirteen, for the use of_. I’m no sort of churchman, let alone—’

‘A High one?’

‘Well, yes. I suppose it is very High, isn’t it?’

‘As a kite. And when the Peterhouse men are up, twice as predatory.’ Frank smiled, suddenly amused that the ticklish matter of Anglican ritual counted as neutral territory with this interlocutor. ‘Would you like coffee? I’m at King’s—just down the—’

‘I should, very much. Thank you.’  

*

With the unerring instinct of a very tall man for the seat that will make him appear most ludicrous to the company, Hughes chose, over the fireside armchair whose mostly intact springs marked it for guest and undergraduate use, a blue velvet _chaise longue_ , one of the pieces that Frank had salvaged, arbitrarily, from his mother's house at its sale. 

‘What splendid quarters,’ he remarked.

‘Not too bad, as these things go. I _was_ rather afraid that they’d stow me in a lightless cupboard when I retired from teaching. Embarrassing Edwardian fossil, you know. Will you excuse me? My bedder can sometimes be charmed into catering a little, but she can’t be dissuaded from the convenient abomination that is Nescafé _._ So I do for myself. _’_  

Frank shuffled into the gyp adjacent to his set. The automatic manoeuvres of his unlikely but effective mid-morning coffee method (saucepan, tin of Carnation) proved no distraction to his agitated thought. The courteous, rather mindless old soldier in his sitting-room was a being different in every particle from the schoolboy of more than half a century before; so, for that matter was the superannuated don from the young swell of Adams’s. And yet, not. They had last spoken—and discounting the subsequent, wholly impersonal exchanges of a prefect with his junior, the words had been bitterly unkind—in an England that had likewise seen all her planking and oars replaced. The bedder's transistor wailed mawkishly up the staircase, distorted by the unforgiving masonry: _pa rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum_.

Sighing, he investigated the barrel for biscuits (stale, they should have to do without), decanted the beige emulsion into the warmed pot on the tray, and let the saucepan drop with an unnecessary clatter into the sink. As he re-entered the sitting-room, Hughes got up spryly to hold open the door, and closed both behind him. Since the solecism could not be corrected unobtrusively, Frank silently pardoned it, put the tray on the table, bent to turn on the gas fire, and settled into his armchair.

They sat for an uncomfortable few moments in silence. The Susie Cooper coffee-cups that Frank had bought in one of his periodic excursions into stylishness looked impossibly frail and effeminate in Hughes’s great, liver-spotted hand.

‘I—suppose you live nearby?’

‘Saffron Walden.’

Frank, considering that a pleasantry alluding to Nashe was unlikely to be appreciated, commented on the prodigious size of the church, the unusually good town library and the Youth Hostel’s mention in _Pevsner_.

‘My nephew's a Fellow of Churchill—the new one, you know,’ Hughes said, redundantly. ‘Engineering. When I retired from Wrykyn; I was bursar there for—I say, I’m telling this backwards, aren’t I? And shouldn’t you go first? On point of seniority?’

Frank grinned. ‘The difference dwindles in significance rather, doesn’t it? I don’t see that a man of seventy-one should _necessarily_ defer to one of seventy-three. But mine is probably shorter. And far duller. Apart from the first lot—Rifle Brigade—I’ve been here ever since—since, writing books that no-one wants to read; I’m diversifying in my dotage by writing one that no-one will want to publish. Home Guard in the last war, because of the leg—quite gloriously ignominious, by the way. I was home on leave in ’18, messing about on a friend’s motorbike. Mark Jevons—he must have been after your t—anyway, I came off at speed and smashed up my kneecap—probably should have lost the leg were it not that surgeons had got a bit more used to that sort of thing—but the Armistice came before I could walk without a crutch. I always feel rather a fraud—’

‘Hardly think the MC—’ Hughes exclaimed, and coughed. ‘I—well, I read it in _Who’s Who_. So you've only yourself to blame. Lepidoptery and madrigal-singing. _Really_?’

Suddenly disinclined to engage in the peculiar futilities of _passing_ , Frank said, ‘No. My real ones are _quite_ unprintable.’

Although he made no perceptible movement, something definitive shifted in Hughes’s bearing and Frank saw for the first time the lineaments of the sensuous boy’s face in the weathered old man’s. Hughes put down his empty cup. ‘Mind if I smoke?’ 

Frank waved his hand in permission and accepted a cigarette from Hughes’s case.

‘Last I heard,’ he said quickly, ‘you were at Sandhurst.’

‘I’d hoped to get an Indian regiment, but I wasn’t quite placed high enough for that. But the next year the balloon went up—saw some of Egypt, Mesopotamia—and I applied to join the A.I.R.O. Got a commission in the 6th Rajputana Rifles in ’19. Spent most of the 20s and 30s in Northern Command—Rawalpindi District; then as a staff officer in Lucknow. Shipped out to Malaya with III Corps in ’41. Well, you probably know how that ended.’

Frank drew a breath.

‘I was in Changi for the duration, which makes me one of the lucky ones. One could sometimes save lives, in Changi, with a bit of ingenuity—though not, as it happens, the life I most wanted to.’ His hand shook as he tapped ash. 

‘I’m sorry—’ Frank offered helplessly.

‘He was injured on a work party. Clearing stumps in the swamp. Just a flesh wound, really, but it went bad, and there was no medicine. Doc wanted to amputate, but I convinced him to hold off a day. Worst thing I ever did. I—got hold of some antitoxin and sulpha from an Aussie black marketeer—but it was too late; his system was wrecked by dysentery and pellagra. The knocks he took when his kite came down were never treated properly, either. Our bodies are such—such _traitors_. If it had only been a matter of mental resilience—at the beginning we’d decided to hold classes, for morale, you know. I taught about three blokes about three phrases of Punjabi, all of them indecent, before I got fed up. You can’t think straight on a quarter-pound of rice a day. But _he_ kept at it—absolutely dogged. Amateur naturalist; quite brilliant in his way. The younger chaps used to laugh at him, of course. He loved whales. Loved them to distraction.’ Hughes fixed the fawn, green and yellow coffee-pot with a sodden look compounded of hysteria and contempt. ‘Can’t imagine why I’m telling you this,’ he informed it viciously, grinding out his cigarette.

‘It’s easier, sometimes, with someone one barely knows.’

‘Yes. Well, I retired from the Army in ’47, and fell on my feet, considering—pal of my brother-in-law’s was leaving Wrykyn short of a bursar, and he suggested I apply. Tony Gibson—the Headmaster—and I became quite friendly. Very happy there, for a few years; very. But Tony made one of those curious marriages late in life—stringy, earnest girl of twenty-five or so. Dreadfully studious, but no intelligence in her that I could see, and no sense of humour whatsoever. It was about time to pick up my carriage clock anyway, so I realised some capital and bought the cottage in Walden.  Quite a crowded life, overall. And then it emptied out, rather abruptly. I’m supposed to be writing my memoirs, but I just go to the library and get distracted by reference books. From thence the King’s Arms. Sunday lunch each week with Nick and Helen and the girls—’

'Some men might call it idyllic.'

'I call it fucking tedious.'

Frank, to whose affections vivid candour was a broad way and a straight (military language never hurt either), made an impulsive offer of hospitality, regretting immediately not the invitation itself so much as the feeling of shabbiness that would for weeks attend the slinking hope that it would not be taken up.

'Thanks awfully, old boy, but I—’

Frank flinched inwardly at his own condescension.

‘I beg your pardon. I don’t know what I was thinking, to ask you to renew an acquaintance that must hold painful memories.’

‘Painful? Whatever do you—oh. Good Lord, no, no—’ Hughes looked at his knees and shook his long, narrow head. He glanced up impishly. ‘I suppose I _ought_ to cast you as the villain in my personal _Tom Brown’s Schooldays,_ oughtn’t I? Throwing me over and pinching the boy I fancied from under my nose, then preaching me a half-hour sermon on moral hygiene into the bargain. What a ghastly prig you were, Maddox. But I adored you.’ He took a breath as if to add something, but caught it.

Frank had for so long held himself culpable over Hughes’s expulsion that he had almost forgotten that the chain of causation was not direct. That the circumstances which had given rise to the most important and sustained attachment of his life must be for this other a long-dead matter of puerile jealousy and grievance had of course crossed his mind, but always in the character of self-excuse. ‘That wasn’t quite what I meant. I—I provided the example for your—well, for your disgrace,’ he stammered.

‘For Christ’s sake. Do you honestly think I shouldn’t have worked it out without you to give me a construe? Anyway, there were others who would’ve if you’d embraced sainthood from the start. Not Crookles, he was nine-tenths normal, and he reserved his ten per centum for hating you. But Osborne, or Westcott—and they would have made a fine piece of filth of it. It hurt the more when you dropped me—because you’d been so kind, but better to have loved and lost, as the poet says.’

‘Oh, Tom. Oh my dear. Would you like a drink? Sherry?’

‘Rather.’  

‘It’s a very moderate dry Oloroso, but it _keeps well_ , which has, somewhat dismayingly, become a consideration.’ Frank fetched glasses and decanter from a cupboard set in the panelling between bookcases.

‘No, look, did I speak roughly? I didn’t mean to. I dare say the infamous letter might have had a little less Plato in it without your influence—but really, that’s absolutely the limit of your responsibility. I was a thoroughgoing little shit of sixteen, who richly deserved the boot for making an exhibition and a nuisance of himself, and it did me no harm. Actually, I’d pretty much forgotten all about it until I saw Blaize’s obituary in the _Times_.’

Sherry pooled on the low table; absorbed at its eastern limit by a back number of the _Journal of Hellenic Studies_ , it met at its northern the tray holding the coffee things, and poured into a tiny western cataract. Hughes retrieved his glass with an elegant reflex action, professionally sharpened. Frank swore and, leaning across the table, applied his handkerchief semi-effectually.

‘I’m sorry. You’d stayed friends?’

Frank abandoned the attempt and the soiled square of linen, righted his glass and refilled it. ‘Yes. Yes, we had.’ He forced himself to look Hughes in the eye.

‘Bloody hell. I had no idea—Frank—please forgive me.’

‘Piffle. How could you have known? _Mr Blaize was unmarried. He is survived by his sister, Mrs Margery Herrick_.’ Frank felt his voice thickening and made a gesture of discomfort at sticky fingers. He got up, entered the small bedcloset and washed his hands at the basin, struggling to control breath made shallow and hiccuping by something more than grief, something he couldn’t quite place.

When he emerged, Hughes was, inevitably, on his feet at the end of the chaise longue, between Frank and his armchair. He put his hand on Frank’s left shoulder and said ‘May I?’

Frank nodded, belatedly realising that the sported oak had not, after all, been the minor gaffe of a man who had not been to university—he, F.X. Maddox, at his age and in his own rooms, was _being seduced_. _Had been_ , in fact. Hughes had planned it, at least since Frank had left the room to make coffee, probably since they’d met in the church. Had it been any other man on earth, Frank would have perceived it immediately. But Hughes—even a Hughes who had passed the Psalmist’s mandate of years—was fixed in his mind as object, not agent.

Hughes’s kiss was like him: mannerly and generous. Frank found himself touched and affected, rather than excited into desire, but desire it was, and to his great relief it was located in the present, in the rangy, rawboned body that enfolded his, not in the memory of sweet young flesh straining beneath him.  He returned the kiss with sufficient enthusiasm to leave Hughes slightly short-winded as he shrugged out of his jacket and loosened his tie.

‘You know—I don’t mean—by the way—to try and—replace—’

‘You couldn’t and I wouldn’t want you to.’ There would be time enough to explain what he really meant by that, Frank thought, surprising himself with the notion that, then, he expected there to be a _next time_. Hughes kissed him again, pushing the jacket from his shoulders; Frank wriggled and let it fall, then tugged at his tie and collar. One of Hughes’s hands was in the small of Frank’s back, the other, in the region of his fly buttons, had become interrogative. He leaned back. 

‘Tom—I’m afraid I don’t always put on much of a show, these days.’

‘Who does, darling? I want you as much as ever I did, though.’

‘I am just the same as when/Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ Hughes urged him gently towards the bedroom.

*

Frank had been stout in his sixties; the slow waste of old age and the swifter induced by grief had reduced him to the approximate proportions (and the wardrobe, some of which was now scattered across the floor of the bedroom) of Between the Wars. For the first time naked in friendly company in—he didn’t care to remember how long—he was glad of the shrinkage but ashamed of the slack skin it had left. Copious, wiry hair, still mostly black, covered some of the flabby folds as it did not the white, ribbed scar tissue of his left thigh and twisted knee. Tom—who had the sparse, pale body-hair of a former redhead, the enviable waist and less covetable spindle-limbs of someone never troubled by fleshiness—didn’t seem to mind any of it a bit. His love-making was not imaginative, but astoundingly thorough: brought off at last by the deft action of mouth and tongue after innumerable little dalliances with the brink, Frank thought he had not been quite so deeply satisfied for years. To banish _tristesse_ is a rare gift, and next to it Frank felt his own perverse refinements rather tawdry and commonplace. Tom, though, was pleasurably shocked and titillated by them; his nature both submissive and defiant enough to conspire with Frank’s need to command. They missed lunch and frittered the short hours of light away; Tom’s great-nieces were destined, on Christmas Day, to be equally delighted by the presentation of pound notes and their mother’s ill-concealed chagrin at it. 

As they dressed in the flattering electric light cast by the small bedside lamp, Tom said, ‘You will come out to Walden in the new year? Stop as long as you please—’

‘I should love it,’ Frank replied sincerely. ‘Are you sure you won’t stay to Hall? The food’s only ever middling, but you must be ravenous.’

‘Better not, my dear. But thank you.’ 

His farewell kiss had the same dependable, square-built air of all his caresses—Frank distinctly heard David’s voice say (though he had received the intelligence in a letter) _Adams told me Hughes had passed into Sandhurst. He must have become a decent chap again_. 

They parted with a self-conscious handshake in the porter’s lodge. Walking back across Front Court with a parcel that had arrived by the second post, Frank recognised, to his astonishment, that for the first time in his life, he had a _lover_ , in the world’s sense of that word: one person in whom the demands of both carnality and amity might find a measure of fulfillment. It was impossible that he should ever again love anyone as he had loved David, but it was no betrayal of that love to taste something less complete and more ordinary. Feeling exhilarated but balanced, as if he were driving a chaise with a well-matched pair, he broke irrepressibly into Dowland’s setting of ‘My Robin’s to the Greenwood Gone.’ Not the dour, deserted staircase, not two untouched copitas of indifferent Oloroso, not a single bed with its linen disordered and stained, not all the ancient guilt in all the world could, at that moment, have dampened his spirits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is set in 1963. I've ignored, as usual, the desultory 1920s setting of _David of King's_ , and inserted the First World War (and the Second) into the Blaiziverse.
> 
> St-Peter-Without is Little St Mary's, Cambridge, in light disguise. Before its 14th-century rededication to the Virgin Mary the church was known as St Peter-Without-Trumpington-Street.
> 
> Hughes's given name is never mentioned in canon. I assume that his nickname of 'Topknot' is an allusion to 'Tom, Tom, the piper's son' (aka [Over the Hills and Far Away](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over_the_Hills_and_Far_Away_%28traditional_song%29)), and that the coincidence with the author of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_ is deliberate mischief on Benson's part. The title is from George Farqhuar's version of the song, the first, as far as I know, to give the lyrics a military dimension.
> 
> 'Gyp' is Cambridgese for the kitchenettes in college accommodation. Older sets of rooms in Cambridge colleges usually have double entrance doors. To shut ('sport') the outer door ('oak') is an anti-social gesture which indicates that the inmate is out, working, in bed, or otherwise does not wish to be disturbed. The convention when engaged in some social activity such as having a friend to tea or coffee is to close only the inner door.
> 
> 'I am just the same as when...' Frank quotes Thomas Hardy, 'After a Journey'.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'Being a bedder means much more than being just a "College employee"; it involves a kind of pastoral care, even a kind of love'— _The Cambridge Student_ , 2008. 
> 
> It was ever thus.

‘Ooh, Peg, what a lovely poinsettia. I can never get the flowers to stay red, though—aren’t they leaves really? And they always go all leggy and woody on me— _and_ a pound of Milk Tray—who’s the secret admirer?’

‘Cheek, young lady. Happen I’ve earned them, up to my armpit plunging the gyp sink on E staircase—don’t I say to him every time I see him, practically— _Mr Maddox_ , I says, _I don’t know why you want to drink that filthy foreign stuff in the first place, wreaks havoc with the digestion, but_ if _you_ must _then tip the grounds out onto a bit of old newspaper and put them in the bin._ What could be easier, and does he take a blind bit of notice? Does he heck as like. Clogs up the plumbing something chronic, and you get unspeakable stuff coming out of the—’

‘I think he’s rather a sweet old gaffer. And compared to what some of the undergraduates get up to—remember the Japanese sword, the two-bar heater and the fancy rats in Bodley Court—’ 

‘Ugh, don’t. Nightmares for weeks, I had.  _And_ he burns papers in the w.p.b.—the _smell_ , and if it got out of control I shouldn’t like to say, all those dry old books and whatnot and him with a gammy leg. But they all have their little _ways_ , don’t they—what’d we talk about otherwise? He’s a gent., though. You don't get Christmas presents off of many of them, do you, or it's a tin of mouldy old Crawford's Rover. Proper bachelor of the old school, he is—'

‘I’d say they still didn’t _let_ them get married when he got here—’

'He’s not quite _that_ antique, Liz—but here, let me tell you, I go in there yesterday morning and as well as the usual chaos—broken tennis racquets, I ask you—he can’t have played since before the First War—he’s gone and tipped sherry all over that pretty French-polished coffee table and the little Chinese silk rug and he didn’t even _try_ to mop it up. _Well,_ I says, _I’ll do my best_ , but once it’s _dried_ in—and it was the dark sticky stuff too— _ruined_ , I’m afraid, and then I go into the bedroom and the bed’s unmade, which isn’t like him—and Liz, the _state_ of the sheets—I didn’t know where to look. You expect it with the young men, but at his age—anyway—I pop my head out and ask if he wanted them laundered and he’s whistling one of those tunes of his—Elizabethan or what are they, fit to bust your ear-drum, I never knew anyone whistle so loud. And I says _you’re in good form this morning_ , because he hasn't half been glum since he started stopping up at weekends, you know, he always used to go to Town, but the pal he stayed with there died, a famous author, apparently, though _I'd_ never heard of him, and anyway he says _yes,_ _I happened to meet yesterday with a person I’d once been rather close to and hadn’t seen in years_. And I says, _oh, that’s nice, Mr Maddox_ , and he looks at me, well, quite _unmistakably_ , if you know what I mean, and says in a sort of dreamy voice, _yes, Mrs Thurston, yes, it was_.’

‘Just come out with it, just like that? The old dog.’

‘Well that’s what I thought. Except I was having a natter with Len in the Buttery and I happened to mention it and he said Maddox had been at Hall every evening this week—’

‘Well, happen they didn’t go out—’

‘Except Vic from the porter’s lodge was in there having a smoke as well and he said he was on all day Wednesday and he’d certainly have noticed if old Maddox came in with a ladyfriend—they were falling about laughing at me for my dirty mind and _was I setting my cap at the dons now_. I told them to shut up their nonsense—’

‘I dunno, Peg, it’s not unheard of, is it?—and he _is_ quite good-looking still—if I was twenty years older—’

‘Ooh, _no_ —never been housetrained, and talking Ancient Greek—imagine that over your bacon and eggs—and then _Vic says hang on—Maddox did have a visitor that afternoon, tall bald bloke with a ‘tache—looked like a retired colonel or something, Forces written all over him, anyway—_ there’s _your_ shershay lah famm _—_ and they started clutching their sides again _—_ I didn’t half feel a flat, Liz, I can tell you. Anyway, pass us that carrier bag, love _—_ ’

‘Peg. Peggy.’

‘What, dear?’

‘What if he was?’

‘ _Eh_? Who was what?’

‘The old colonel. _Was—_ the lady in the case.’

‘Oh, good Lord. Of _course_. Wish I’d thought to say it: that would given the pair of cheeky young bu _—_ sods a bit of a facer _._ Well, you see all sorts in this line, Liz, that’s what I’ve always said _—live and let live_ , you could do worse for a motto. Don't mind if I do _—_ have you a light? The old Provost _—_ no the _old-old_ one _ _—__ Sheppard _—_ was before your time, wasn’t he? The things you used to hear about _him_ , now _—_ ’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The adjective frequently applied to John Tressider Sheppard, Provost of King's College, Cambridge between 1933-1954 is 'flamboyant.'


End file.
